I’d heard about GenCon for a couple of years thanks to new friends made while being in and on streams. Lots of nerdery and good times to be had. Comics, board games, tabletop games, and good times with friends. It seemed cool and something that I might try in that ever distant “one day”, but hadn’t really considered it until Anoriand offered to make it a group meet and greet this year.
A few DMs later, we’d decided on an AirBnB, a car, and a plane. Alcohol and food preferences were discussed along with arrangements for cuddle piles. It was going to be a pretty good time by all accounts and it was a good reason to get myself on out of the house for a few days.
…I think we all know how that went...
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The last few months had been spent getting more and more comfortable with sharing my ideas about worldbuilding in tabletop games. I was asking questions and people were resonating with them, so I kept asking.
In the absence of GenCon to look forward to, I kept asking questions and seeking answers. I acquired a MASKS book for my troubles along with a number of new twitter friends. One of them would be Jess. Another would be Imani.
I don’t know the feeling to describe how surprised I was to get a message from Jess saying, “Hey, we have some GenCon panels coming up. If you want to be in on them, we’d love to have you!” and another with “Would you want to join this one-shot?”
It was heartwarming to be seen and considered that I was somehow one of the cool kids and could join this panel and do all these things. The people I was with were all people of color. The attendance that day was 4.6K viewers for that one-shot. We had front page time. I talked about villains and failure.
The panelists and producers (!!!!) were so kind. Gracious. The conversation just flowed. I felt like I belonged there sharing my experience, nascent as it was. My background in doing webinars for work came in handy and I’m normally just comfy doing this, but it was also official. It was just as much warmth as whirlwind that weekend and I would absolutely do it again with these folks in less than a heartbeat.
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It’s taken me a while to type these words, but I’ve had them circling within me for months now. I hope I get to do this more. It was great.
If you want to see where I got to hangout and talk about things, well….
Being a divisive, evil PC → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M59j9zX7wi4
Failing forward → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNW-uoP4bcI
Magic & Mischief One-shot → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-bSgocorEU
To everyone involved: thank you for seeing me and welcoming me as worthy into all of this. Not only to these panels, but to what I feel could be a beautiful friendship with all of you. I didn’t think I’d be here, but here I am all the same. I like this place.